Part of the problem is what constitutes a fighter. Is every young, male Sunni from Mosul an ISIS fighter? They’ve been getting a couple hundred recruits per week, as they’ve had a couple hundred fighters killed per week. Is that really holding steady? Or are they replacing trained terrorists with no fear of death with losers who will panic the moment they realize that those are real bullets?
Great post! What constitutes a regular army in a “state” such as ISIL/ISIS?
Boots on the ground would answer a lot of these questions. I’m no soldier, but I would think battlefield observations would go pretty far to get some solid answers.
Maybe the Jordanians will tell us.
Here’s some unofficial intel. I regularly visit my local convenience store (its a cliche, but whatever), and have made acquaintance with a Jordanian working at the store and living here in the states to get his accounting degree. He happens to be from a town on the Syrian border and his relatives are telling him that 10,000 Jordanian troops are massed there ready to cross the border and attack. I know they’ve had a military presence on the border with Syria and have had clashes there, but apparently the troop strength has increased significantly in the past week.